The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth

The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth

Irving Kirsch

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 0465022006

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

Irving Kirsch has the world doubting the efficacy of antidepressants. Based on fifteen years of research, The Emperor's New Drugs makes an overwhelming case that what the medical community considered a cornerstone of psychiatric treatment is little more than a faulty consensus. But Kirsch does more than just criticize: He offers a path society can follow to stop popping pills and start proper treatment.

the lowest effective dose. So when increasing the dose of antidepressants, doctors are merely following the manufacturer’s advice, as reported in the Summary of Product Characteristics. If the dose response curve is flat and higher doses produce an ‘increased potential for undesirable effects’, why does the Summary of Product Characteristics advise doctors to triple the dose if patients do not respond well enough to a lower dose? The key to understanding this contradiction is our old and

Effect and the Power of Belief When our most recent - and most definitive - meta-analysis was published, the headlines in many newspapers blazoned that ‘antidepressants don’t work’.1 The Daily Telegraph headline phrased it more specifically, clarifying that antidepressants are ‘no better than dummy pills’,2 but even this headline was not entirely accurate. What our analyses actually showed was that antidepressants work statistically better than placebos, but that this statistical difference was

It is just not meaningful to try and estimate the effectiveness of medical treatment in general. Some medical treatments are extremely effective, whereas others have much smaller effects, and there are some medical conditions for which effective treatments have not yet been found. This is the basic problem with any attempt to evaluate the overall effectiveness of placebos, as Beecher and the Danish researchers had tried to do. There is not just one placebo effect. Instead, the placebo effect